This room was the original "room of no," the reason this section exists at all. It appears in Extravagance, an excellent French book on outrageous and outlandish decorating schemes. A great many of the people who appear in the book are gay, partly because that's what you get when you go into high design, and partly because the author of the book, Roland Beaufre, is a big queen. He's not, however, a successful queen, as evidenced by this photograph of his own bedroom.

The cult of masculinity is all very well, but one must know where to draw the line. Maybe we're supposed to admire the gentleman's butt. Maybe Beaufre himself finds the butt highly attractive. It is, speaking as a bi woman, a butt with potential, especially if the owner straightens up and lets it round out a little. But it is a butt poised on the verge of taking a dump on the tigerskin pillow, and as a decorator, I have problems with this.

The room doesn't actually come off as being decorated by a gay interior designer. It looks like a room decorated by a colorblind man who thinks he needs to take a stab at decoration because he's gay, and who read somewhere that erotic black-and-white photos of male nudes were daring and edgy. It may also, depending on mood, look like a room decorated by a sadly misled worshipper at the altar of masculinity who thinks that the "statement" should take precedence over all. What the "statement" is I will leave to your discretion. My personal theory is that it was, "My nads are bigger than this steer's!"

So how to fix it? Pictures of this room taken at different angles show intriguing bronze furniture inspired by Northern African themes. It's not, as a whole, a bad room; just this particular shot—the shot of the focus of the room—needs a complete overhaul.

The first move is to take down the photograph and the cowhide. Hang the photograph anywhere else and use the hide as a rug in... some other room that we don't have to look at. Strip the coverlet off the bed and use it as a throw in the living room, where, according to the other photographs, it would actually match. In place of the hide, hang a Northern African weaving. Find an orange, blue, or orange-and-blue coverlet in a pattern that would match the other patterns in this room—preferably a pattern with a lot of white in it, since the room desperately needs lightening. And while you're hunting down the coverlet, get new sheets, too. Denim blue spots on a white background look too Northern New Jersey for a Northern Africa theme.

After that, everything else is just a matter of taste. I would personally yank down the drawing-class "art" and replace the bedside table with something bigger and more functional. I would also lighten the almost traffic-cone intensity of the orange with a thin white glaze, or repaint the room terra-cotta.

Getting rid of the cowhide and the butt shot, though? Mandatory.

The photograph comes from page 185 of
Extravagance: The World of Whimsical Interiors.